Many landowners take a great interest in growing and maintaining good looking lawns and landscapes. This is often achieved, in part, by supplementing the volume of natural rain fall through the use of lawn sprinklers or in-ground irrigation systems. Water, however, is becoming an increasingly scarce resource. Developed countries such as the United States are beginning to experience regional water shortages; for example, in the Atlanta area and Southern California. Experts in the field of water management forecast that regional fresh water shortages such as these will likely increase over coming decades. Accordingly there is an increased need for conservation methods.
Turning to lawn sprinklers, one shortcoming of current sprinkler designs is the fact that they have no means to communicate to the user the depth of water distributed by the selected pattern's coverage area over a given period of time. For example, some sprinklers offer a semi circular pattern, others a full circle, others a square pattern and still others a rectangular pattern. Many horticulturists and seed developers use such figures in developing protocols or instructions for the care of various plants such as lawn grasses. With this in mind, a user wants to provide enough water using a sprinkler system to maximize plant health, but also wants to avoid overwatering for both plant health and conservation reasons. However, conventional sprinkler systems leave the user to make the depth over time quantification by other means. Furthermore, reconciling the results of such a calculation with varying amounts of rainfall between watering makes the task yet more difficult.
A number of garden watering devices have been created to begin addressing these problems. Flow control valves, such as the type disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,028,984 to Wang, allow an operator to control the output level of a lawn sprinkler attached to a water hose. Other devices, such as the type disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,130,135 to Moore, are timers which allow the operator to set a sprinkler to only be operational for a predetermined period of time before actuating a valve that closes off water supply to the lawn sprinkler.
However, the aforementioned devices suffer from various drawbacks. Although these devices allow the operator to control the output level of a sprinkler or the period of time for which the sprinkler is operational, none of these devices allow the operator to accurately determine the volume of water being released over a period of time, due in part to varying flow pressure supplied by a spigot at different houses. Therefore, a landowner would still need to provide the additional accurate measuring means for determining how much water is being delivered to the lawn, particularly the depth. There would be no way to accurately provide a fixed volume of water in the recommended amount of inches per week using the conventional devices without constant monitoring of the system, which reduces the benefit of owning an automatic lawn sprinkler device. Thus, it would be desirable to provide a sprinkler system which helps a user sprinkle the desired amount of water and overcome these deficiencies of conventional sprinkler systems.